21–30 of 38 posts
Illustration: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/505:_A_Bunch_of_R...
I read it. How does this article even make sense?
We need a new adjective for what it is to be like GPT-3 ...
disgenerative?
misformational?
cyberblathering?
babble streaming?
thesaurus gargling?
It doesn't make any sense because we don't know the what, how or the why of it yet. Consciousness makes as much sense as a solar eclipse made to the primitive man who had no conception of the solar system. A program on your computer wouldn't make much sense unless you understood the inner workings - processes, kernel, ABI, CPU, etc. Maybe one day we will find out as we learn more about the brain. Until then we just h…
Biologist have been doing this for decades. Eric Kandel won the Nobel prize just studying a sea slug biting seaweed for years. http://www.laskerfoundation.org/new-noteworthy/articles/eric...
Defining consciousness will come down to doing so simply. Consciousness is emergent given lack of awareness equals lack of consciousness, especially when the lack of awareness is extended to seeing and hearing, or not. Consciousness emerges from awareness of objects, vision, hearing, thinking mind. Who here can visualize an apple in their mind, literally seeing it as if existed and was being perceived by the eye (a s…
Anybody who dreams when sleeping. Is that not everybody ? Ability to do it when awake (lucid dreaming) is a different thing.
> lack of awareness equals lack of consciousness
No it does not. I'd argue that even deep sleep or getting knocked out does not equal loss of consciousness. We can't tell, as consciousness is only perceived through it's contents, so we can't distinguish between absence of contents or absence of container.
> Leave them closed long enough and you will lose what we are seeking to define here.
Consciousness is not the model. It's where the model is built. You only mention perceptions, what about thoughts ?
>I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw? This is the "Argument from Incredulity by Implausible Consciousness Substrate"[0]. Other examples include Searle's Chinese Room, and the China Brain thought experiment (what is it with China?). To your credit, you've immediately spotted the problem - how is the actual human brain any different? It's also some sort of broadly mechanistic physical…
It's a really deep problem, which bothers a lot of philosophers and cognitive scientists. I don't pretend to know the answer, but here are some speculations. We can speculate that consciousness is some kind of a representational process, using non-verbal, non symbolic representations. We can suppose that what is being represented is in part the state of my own body, and my current interactions with the external world…
You're arguing that consciousness is to be understood as a consciousness of the self (and its environment). That implies that there can be intelligence that is not conscious, right?
About the missing sensation of the field of rocks; How about adding some sensors to the system, so depending on measurements like temperature, one could move a certain designated stone, which could then be taken as input by the rules moving all the other stones. Would that change alone yield consciousness? Also, how many different types of such sensations are needed to produce consciousness? Humans sense quite a few different types of such input data, but we can't sense everything there is to be sensed.
In your last two paragraphs, I believe you state that consciousness is just the (mathematical) reflexivity of "thoughts" (i.e. representational processes concerning objects). That's an interesting thought I've pondered as well, but doesn't that just move the problem to whether machines can produce such thoughts? Certainly they can produce representations of thoughts, but do they really think them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what? obviously there is one, its the force driving the typing of these words. It isn't the machinery typing them but the fundamental quality of the machinery that feels like it does. Of course I can't prove my consciousness to you, but I operate on the assumption that p-zombies are nonsense, so, it should be entirely possible to prove your consciousness to yourself, albeit difficult due to lack of meaningful languag…
I have no difficulty accepting my own consciousness, or even yours, to the degree the word has a definition at all. I have subjective experience, including the subjective experience of observing my own behavior. So do you. The redness of a tomato has to look like something , and furthermore has had to evolve to catch the attention of animals like yourself that would be nourished by it. Meanwhile, animals like yoursel…
In my opinion this just delays the question. The question now becomes whether machines can perceive themselves (or really anything at all) or whether they can just mechanically and symbolically represent the perception of objects, including themselves. If the answer is yes, then that implies that any sufficiently large representation of computation has a consciousness and therefore that there is nothing special about it. If it is no, then where's the relevant difference to a human brain?
>I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw? This is the "Argument from Incredulity by Implausible Consciousness Substrate"[0]. Other examples include Searle's Chinese Room, and the China Brain thought experiment (what is it with China?). To your credit, you've immediately spotted the problem - how is the actual human brain any different? It's also some sort of broadly mechanistic physical…
I fail to see how you're not just waving hands. You assume that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, you think it's plausible, but you can't explain it or prove it.
Feel free to expand on how you think it solves the dilemma outlined in the post though!
Consciousness is fundamental, not emergent.
Roger Penrose says it's emergent because quantum mechanics is emergent. You can also find stuff by David Bohm saying something similar regarding Bohmian mechanics or de Broglie-Bohm theory. Here is Hameroff and Penrose's paper on Orch OR: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106451... .
If it emerges from the fundamental features that themselves emerges from “lower” features, isn’t anything “higher up” going to happen? It did for us so it always would?
These guys are really circling for semantics not theories of reality and consciousness. Has anyone considered English is just a terrible system for this sort of reasoning?
I’ll give a virologist and other applied math types props for data driven and concrete outcomes.
These post-modernists are just deconstructing/reconstructing in circles for book sales, IMO.
If they can output something concrete humanity can use give them all the gold in the world. Otherwise it’s just a book club to me anymore
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no difficulty accepting my own consciousness, or even yours, to the degree the word has a definition at all. I have subjective experience, including the subjective experience of observing my own behavior. So do you. The redness of a tomato has to look like something , and furthermore has had to evolve to catch the attention of animals like yourself that would be nourished by it. Meanwhile, animals like yoursel…
> Anything that can perceive itself and can perceive itself perceiving will exhibit all the hallmarks of what we call consciousness. It's a recognizable behavior pattern with a name. In my opinion this just delays the question. The question now becomes whether machines can perceive themselves (or really anything at all) or whether they can just mechanically and symbolically represent the perception of objects, includ…
I have no reason to think that you are not mechanically and symbolically representing the perception of objects and events. A pattern of activation of neurons is a symbol.